Premier League that no-one wants to play in
Packaging may be a bane of modern life, as anyone who has lost the plot trying to unwrap a stock cube will surely testify, but it is considered all-important by those trying to sell the product.
Various sports have learned this lesson over the last 20 years but some have been slower on the uptake than others and, as befits one that has a dress code that can appear straight from the pages of PG Wodehouse, horse racing has never quite been on the cutting edge of such marketing revolutions - despite the efforts of some who inhabit its bubble.
One of the problems is that horseracing seems to oscillate between regarding itself as a sport or an industry, at times trying to modernise but without integrating with a world that has long since discarded the trilby. The advent of the Racing For Change organisation brought a new word to the sport’s lexicon, “premiertisation”.
The idea was to allow the major fixture to blossom from the confines of a 1500-meeting fixture list and make them more attractive to the public. The next, supposedly slim-line, fixture list for 2011 is still on a drawing board somewhere in the BHA offices, but this week there was talk of another aspect of premiertisation.
Like most other sports, racing is seeking ways of increasing its revenue and one stream that they would like to flow more strongly is that of television rights, with the major racecourses in Britain apparently ready to test the water over whether they have a right to cut a deal for themselves, packaging the rights to Cheltenham, Royal Ascot, the Derby, the Grand National, Glorious Goodwood and other major meetings to sell to the highest bidder - for a premium price of course.
This is hardly news in itself because a group of tracks that called itself "Super 12" were seriously considering such a move a decade ago. While some courses, like Ascot which is owned by the Queen, are independent, any such endeavour would revolve around Jockey Club Racecourses, who control not only Cheltenham, Aintree and Epsom but, for example, Newmarket which gives them rights to four of the five Classics.
The classic conundrum is just how to make this work. As Jockey Club Racecourses say on their own website: "As the group responsible for staging the Cheltenham Festival, the Grand National and the Derby, Jockey Club Racecourses has a key role to play with regard to the television coverage for British racing.
“In addition to significant terrestial TV coverage on Channel 4 and the BBC, Jockey Club Racecourses owns around 50% of Racecourse Media Group, which is the umbrella company under which Racing UK sits. In addition to Racing UK, Racecourse Media Group also generates income for its shareholders from overseas sales, on-line activities and by managing the racecourses share in Turf TV.”
Nothing can happen until the current broadcasting rights deals end in 2013 but Simon Bazalgette, the chairman of Jockey Club Racecourses, seemed to suggest that a change of strategy was being considered when he said to The Guardian this week that: “2013 is still a very long way away, and we are not even close to making any decision on what will happen at that stage. But it is not rocket science to say that, as with any sport, what drives your media rights is the top level, as we see with the Premier League. In terms of bringing new people in and refreshing the racing audience, the premier end is where that is always going to be achieved.”
What that achieved was an interesting clarification from Scott Bowers, group director of communications for Jockey Club Racecourses, who said while Jockey Club Racecourses stood by what had been said the idea of a Premier League “has certainly not come from us.”
So if there is no fire why are some people choking on the smoke?
The idea appears to be that a single package, cherry-picked from the top of racing’s fixture pyramid, could be sold to bidders perhaps away from the current television partners Channel 4, whose coverage is part subsidised by the sport itself, and the BBC, who have cut back heavily on their coverage of racing.
That leaves ITV, who are still digging themselves out of the slump in advertising, and Sky, who could only be allowed to show races like the Grand National and the Derby if there was a change in the law to remove them from their current protected status on a list of British sporting events that must be accessible to terrestrial television viewers. And if you think all this sounds rather familiar, it is.
Except that two years ago it was a called the Sovereign Series, which was intended to attract a new audience by harnessing established races during the Flat season within the framework of a competition that its supporters hoped would produce “the narrative” that would “broaden consumer interest in the sport by linking 10 of the most prestigious races in the racing calendar” and uses a Formula One-style points system to crown Britain's champion Flat racehorse.
That particular vessel to racing’s fiscal Promised Land has sunk without trace and it will be interesting to see how any future ventures are packaged, because it will give a true indicator of just where the sport’s stock lies.
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